Google top is made up of 200+ ranking signals. But while it’s definitely useful to know them , the entire list is a very time-consuming read.

It’s somewhat vague in terms of the impact of each individual factor, and all of those things don’t seem doable if you try to get each one right. With the news about another Google update or algorithm change rolling out every other week, how can anyone keep up, ever?

SEO Tactics that will Skyrocket your Rankings

I’m going to show you 10 seo tactics that you should use to improve your Google Rankings. Some of them are old while others are quite new but proven to work effectively.

#1 Link to authority sites

If you are going to link to other websites, make sure that the website you are linking to is a quality site and doesn’t have SPAM on it. The higher the quality of the websites that you are linking to, the more qualified your website will be seen..

Your content will rank way better than your competitors that do not include links to sites with authority. Don’t be afraid to link to others that published reports or articles on the topic you are writing.

Top Ten Sites that appear in Google when you search for your niche keywords

#2. Use keywords / keyphrases in your title and content

Keywords are a very important way for search engines and visitors to know what your website content is about. This will be one of the first things that potential visitors will see on the search engine results page and will give a clear indication as to what is on your page.

Visitors are more likely to stay on your page if they continue to see the keywords that they searched for that brought them to your page. It is recommended that you try and use keywords within the first one hundred words of your content if possible.

#3. Improve your Click through rate (CTR)

A click-through rate, or CTR, is a ratio of the number of times a given search listing was clicked on to the number of times it was displayed to searchers. SearchMetrics’ ranking factors study even found that CTR has the highest correlation with rankings out of all factors examined.

For every query, Google expects a CTR in a certain range for each of the listings (e.g. for branded keywords, the CTR of No.1 result is around 50%; for non-branded queries, the top result gets around 33% of clicks). If a given listing gets a CTR that is seriously above (or below) that range, Google can re-rank the result accordingly.

The first thing you’d want to do is check your snippets’ current click-through rates. To do that, log in to Google Search Consoleand go to the Search Analytics report. Select Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Position to be displayed.

As you write your title and description, make sure they clearly communicate the value of clicking through your page to searchers. (What do visitors get).

If appropriate, use a call to action and instead of simply describing what your page is about, address the searcher directly, and inform them about the benefits of navigating to your page, choosing your product, and so on.

#4. Optimize your website for mobile

About 94 percent of people now use their phones or tablets to search and make purchases on websites.Google tends to rank sites that are mobile friendly higher than those that are not.

Google’s previously said that over half of search queries globally come from mobile devices. From a nice-to-have feature, mobile friendliness has turned into a must — if your page isn’t optimized for mobile devices, it’s likely to be discarded from mobile search results completely.

If you already have a mobile page, then you should focus even more on improving it in 2017 than ever before. Use Google Mobile Friendly Test to test your website.

Do you use a CMS like WordPress and your website is not mobile friendly ? All you need to do is find a mobile friendly theme and install it. If you’re not on a popular CMS you may need to create a different version for your website for mobile devices, which is not quite easy. That’s why I suggest you to hire a freelancerto do it for you.

#5. Speed up your website

No one likes a slow site. If your website takes more than 4 seconds to load, you could lose up to 75 percent of repeat users.

Google has officially confirmed that it uses page speed in its ranking algorithm. Page speed can also influence your SEO indirectly, as search engines will likely crawl fewer pages if your site is slow due to the allocated crawl budget.

Google’s mentioned they expect pages to load in 2 seconds or less. The most common culprit for slow pages is an abundance of uncompressed content on the page, such as scripts, images, or CSS files. You can speed up your load time by switching to a faster hosting service, compress your images, and use a Content Delivery Service.

Use this free tool provided by Google to measure the loading speed of your website and see what you can improve to make it faster. As you can see from the pic above, there are some things that can be improved here on monetize.info as well 🙂

#7. Generate / Earn powerful backlinks

In several of its patents, Google suggests that a site’s overall link score (arguably the biggest ranking signal) is made up by individual quality scores passed on to it by every incoming link. That literally means that more links will result in a higher score — as long as they aren’t link schemes, of course.

It’s also important to note that links coming from the same domain (especially site-wide links) carry little weight; Google will often only count one of those links when evaluating your link profile.

Make sure that the backlinks that you are generating come from trusted quality sites (see point 1). Avoid posting your link on every free forum and free backlink site available. Instead create strong content that will be picked up and shared by reputable sites. Some other great ways to build backlinks is to guest blog, find broken link building opportunities, and stay on top of your competitors backlinks.

7.1 Find broken links opportunities

If you find a broken link on a website or blog, let the Webmaster know in a quick email, and make sure to include your link. They might include the link to your website on their page as a form of gratitude.

Going further into this, while you are tracking your competitors backlinks, look for any that are broken.

When you find one, again notify the Webmaster, but make sure to link directly to content on your website that is both relevant and live and suggest it as a substitution to your competitor’s broken link.

#8. Create quality, engaging content

Quality trumps quantity in your content. Make sure that you are creating content that people want to read and share. The higher the shareability factor of your content, the more likely you are to receive backlinks to your content, thus helping to increase your SEO ranking.

The discussion on whether or not social signals affect rankings directly is ongoing, but multiple real-life experiments prove that pages with more social shares rank better. SearchMetrics’ study also found that Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Google+ mentions strongly correlate with search engine rankings.

If you’re serious about your social media presence you definitely need to use a social media tool that will help you maximize your results with less effort. Check our round up on 15 twitter automation tools you should use.

#9. Make your website secure

Adding extra security and encryption to your website creates a layer of credibility to your site, and it ensures your visitors that their personal information is protected. Google will rank sites with “https://” higher than those marked “http://”.

However, please keep in mind that setting up SSL correctly it is not very easy so before doing the change make sure you understand how to do it correctly.

#10. Isn’t all about Google – Don’t ignore BING!

Bing is fueling the search of Siri and Alexa, apart from being the default search engine of Cortana. If you calculate how many iOS/OS X, Windows 10, and Amazon Echo devices are used, then you have a rough idea of how Bing could be important as voice search grows. You can read more about voice search, Cortana, and Bing in this post by Purna Virji.

We welcome SEO experts to write for our audience. Now you can write for us and get published in Monetize.info magazine.

About Daniel S.

Daniel is the founder of MediaDigi.com digital agency and digital marketing manager here at Monetize.info. For over 12 years he has helped hundreds of customers to establish a presence online and win the digital race.

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